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Posted by: Barry Stoller on February 23, 19100 at 12:59:29:

Stoller: You claim that the literature of Marx and Engels supports the social division of labor---untrue again.

RD: Amusingly, I was actually re-iterating teh case you made against me with such force over a year ago, wherein *you* convinced me of the opposite, I remain confuzzled, frankly, by your switch around - I could have cited the exact same passages from Capital as you cited at me back then...

Yes, I often cited the long passage (Capital volume one, chapter 14, section 4) about the 'law of Nature' which socially divided labor among members of primitive communist societies. For some reason, I missed the long passage (Capital volume one, chapter 15, section 9) about Marx's future conception of communist society in which job rotation would be the norm. What a passage to miss!

At that time, I was unacquainted with Marx’s other relevant comments in The Poverty of Philosophy as well as Engels' explicit statement in Principles of Communism. (Back then, I was aware of Engels architect / porter passage in Anti-Dühring but I attributed it, as so many others have, to a random utopian musing akin to the far more famous utterance in The German Ideology.)

The force of all these statements regarding the social division of labor left me with NO DOUBT that Marx and Engels intended future communist society to be one in which all workers share jobs, skilled and unskilled. (Needless to say, Bukharin & Preobrazhensky's ABC of Communism [Bolshevik Party Platform of 1919], which directly called for job rotation, reinforced this interpretation.)

I'm sorry that I convinced you otherwise; had you been the expert on Marx you claim to be, you would have corrected me (then) with the pertinent passages. Just goes to show, RD, that Marxism repays a little scholarly discipline...

Your question about the geographical division of labor is irrelevant; see this post.